


Darker, Sooner

by silvernote17



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post Episode: s07e12 Victory and Death, rexsoka
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:00:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24729370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silvernote17/pseuds/silvernote17
Summary: Rex has always stopped himself from questioning what would happen after the war was over. The future is darker than he expected and came sooner than he planned. Rexsoka.
Relationships: CT-7567 | Rex/Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 10
Kudos: 124





	Darker, Sooner

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "The Darker Sooner," a poem by Catherine Wing. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55154/the-darker-sooner)
> 
> My first Star Wars piece in the nearly 25 yrs of writing fanfic and this is what I come up with... Insert usual non-ownership disclaimer here, as well as the fact I make no money from this work or any other work, and would have more of a chance of being paid to stop writing than to make any income whatsoever on this fic or any other fic in any fandom. Same disclaimer on the poem. 
> 
> Unedited, quickly written, and hastily submitted. Pardon any grammatical/spelling errors, particularly of characters or locations, thank you.
> 
> Also, we like to end sentences with questions because Rex is having The Worst Day of His Life So Far.

Plumes of smoke drifted off debris from the wrecked star cruiser to blot the sun into a deeply overcast muddle of light. Bright blue sky, proof of an unaware or uncaring greater force spinning planets into orbits, shifted into pale yellow before settling on a burning orange. The sunset glimmered through the vague edges of fumes, catching on the torn edges of wreckage sprawled in the sands, to finally diminish into a lavender-tinted twilight that would have been lovely under any other circumstance.

The stench of propellants, lubricants, and myriads of liquids soaking into the sands of a yet-known moon was what pinned Rex to the task of searching the scraps for usable supplies. He knew the smell of blood, the reek of medical antiseptics, the bitter tang of bacta. They were as familiar to him as his own sweat. A soldier knew the drift of ammunition fire on the wind, the faint electric charge off a firearm, the smell of burning cloth and plastoid. These things were not unfamiliar. He had wrecked many a Republic transport on all types of terrain, smelled the dirt on four dozen planets and twice as many moons, knew from experience how to place his feet around ragged debris. It was the unknown that stalled him, pausing his steps when he stopped to accidentally think, when he halted to give a command or check on his men.

The lack of command to give was what caused his heart to skip.

The absence of men to check on was what sent his lungs to the pit of his stomach.

The toxic smoke drifting on the air, blotching his view of the terrain, was less than a minor inconvenience.

When they staggered from the Y-wing, the guts of the haphazardly operational machine groaning as the landing gear sank into the gravel, Rex said nothing. He watched his companion, his Commander, as she took in the scene around them. He saw how she wrapped her arms around herself in a silent attempt to inhale their surroundings without exhaling her grief. They breathed together, assessing, forcing the fear and anger deep into their muscles to fuel what had to come next.

To Rex, what was next was staying alive. He’d been stranded before, had to keep himself moving through whatever means necessary, had the training and experience to know what he needed and how to find it. Ahsoka knew the same, had been dependent on herself so many times, experienced the sting of ignoring what would be proper under any other circumstance besides survival. And so Rex was nearly startled out of his skin when she silently picked up a bit of bent wreckage and made her way to the flat expanse littered with the broken bodies of his brothers. When she knelt and began to dig with that sharp metal edge in her hands, small swirls of dust lifting to coat her arms, he realized what she was doing.

For the second time that day, that terrible day, tears rolled down his face.

At first, he helped, pulling the remains of the 501st into tidy rows and skipping past his emotions with the promise to eulogize later, later when he was safe and Ahsoka was safe and they knew what rock they landed on and what way to go to get far, far away. A war zone was not the place to stage a funeral and his brothers would not want others to die while memorializing bodies meant to perish in places like this.

“Sir-“

Her pale blue eyes lifted, resolute, so much different to him now than his first impression of the Jedi apprentice. He saw the reflection of his Republic-blue pauldron sink into those depths. Drowning in her sorrow, struggling to lift himself out of her own despair, he turned away to resurface with a gasp that hid a sob. She would bury his brothers, her own brothers, and they would lay their family to rest under an unforgiving sky. The war was fought and lost on the ship now scattered in a hundred thousand pieces around them. Fitfully, a thought paced his mind: at least they weren’t all lost to the borderless expanse of space. In one of the mounds of wreckage, he came across a chunk of janitorial closet and dug out only some of the tools scorched beyond use. Silently, afraid to speak for what would come unfiltered from his heart and out his mouth, he brought the shovel to Ahsoka’s side and began to dig the next grave. Dozens. Then a dozen more.

They lifted together, her at the feet and he at the head, and placed each body carefully within the gritty beds. Ahsoka growled on rare occasion, a low rumbling from her Togrutan throat when her usually steady fingers slipped in fatigue. They avoided meeting each other’s eyes while they worked with an efficiency that coated them both in a sweat. It was when she ignored the vulgar shovel and the crude scrap she used to dig the graves that Rex felt his knees go weak. Like a shiny ahead of his first skirmish outside the training confines of Kamino, he felt the urge to run. When she began to shift sooty sand over the bared faces, Rex left her. The rattle of the spare pebbles bouncing off armor cut through the silky waterfall pooling into the shallow pits. The sound imprinted itself in his bruised brain. Never mind the helmets bearing Ahsoka’s face, the painted plastoid placed at the head of each grave as she whispered to each clone, standing watch over bodies that could have passed as Rex himself. 

As he piled med-kits and bedrolls and rations near the sagging Y-wing, the captain ignored his desire to look out over the ruins to catch a glimpse of her slight form as it labored under the burden he should have borne. He bit back the orders on his lips, interrupting his turn to catch a passerby soldier to send him on an errand, pretended he did not just stop in his tracks to convince his heart to keep beating. The panic of being alone as he made each stop at the ship with more supplies was as new to him as when he first stepped on Coruscant for an off-duty night out with Fives and the men. A lifetime, albeit a short lifetime, of firsts and the thing that sends him shaking into the dirt is being by himself. Each inhale pulled the refuse-fumes from a thousand burst containers into his body and he stopped thinking, resumed searching.

The force of impact drove the _Venator_ ’s ship-spine into the dunes to stick out of the sand as bone emerges from skin; it was the loss of this silhouette that roused Rex from his supply-gathering mission. With shame, the familiar sense of selfishness flooding back over him, he convinced himself to approach his commander with a straight back and stern countenance. The brave effect was lost on Ahsoka as she knelt over the last of the burial mounds. These graves were not dug as deep as the first few, their efforts foiled by sand and rock escaping back into the shovel mouth with cruel effortlessness, and Ahsoka had formed cairns where she judged the shallowest graves to be insufficient. Although no animal had yet to make an appearance, neither knew what lived and hunted on this moon.

“Sir?”

He waited several moments for a response, for any sign she heard him, before trying again.

“Commander, we need-“

“Rex,” she interrupted in nothing more than a whisper. “Please. Call me Ahsoka.”

He had heard her angry before. He had heard her happy. Even joyous, playful. He knew her insecurity, her discomfort, her growing pains transforming in her roles as padawan and leader. He knew the love in her voice when she called him her friend, her best friend, and he knew the lengths he would go to so she would never know sadness or pain when she was with him. But this- this utter heartbreak in every syllable… it was a plea. He wished he could drop to his knees and hold her, pull the bloodied hands away from where she wrapped them around her sides once more. He would promise her this would be the worst it ever was and remind her they made it through. He would comfort her and remind her they were alive, use her body to remind his to breathe, listen close to her heart to force his own to match her rhythm. But this was Ahsoka, his ‘Soka. Only in his dreams had he ever laid so much as a finger on her, in a brotherly way or otherwise, and he respected her too much to lie to her. There was little comfort to be found from here on out. This was the Between, the transition between who they were and who they had to be, and Rex was as confused as he’d ever been.

“Sure, kid. We need to find shelter, away from the- ”

The way her form curled in on itself, so briefly he thought he imagined it in the gathering dark, he knew he had done wrong. He had done this all wrong from the moment they put foot on this blasted moon, on this wretched soil, and he finally allowed his watery knees to give way as he knelt by her side. Her body stiffened slightly, unsure, as he offered her his open hand.

“Ahsoka,” he said, hating the sound of his own voice as he said her name slowly, feeling it form in his mouth with an unfamiliar weight in the gathering dark. “Ahsoka. You deserved better than this. Than any of this-“

His voice cracked and he put his open palm back in his lap, bowing his head, unable to see the flex of his fingers in the near-night. There was no more residual twilight, nothing but memory to guide him from the graves to the Y-wing, and he was thankful the darkness covered his crumpled face.

A Togrutan warrior, a Jedi in every way but formal knighting, a beautiful soul in a universe in desperate need of her strength and heart, and he called her ‘kid.’ This wasn’t the snippy little padawan he first met, a liability on the battlefield, a Jedi-in-training with the Jedi superiority complex to match. This was a woman who dug graves for his men and uttered blessings over their graves in Mando’a while he counted blankets and bacta patches. She deserved better.

“I can’t feel my Master in the Force,” she said, sitting next to him in the darkness. “Nothing. There was a disturbance, a severance-“

Her breathing shuddered as she paused and Rex felt her tension lock her body as she regained her composure.

“I don’t know where he is but I don’t think he survived.”

Rex felt her fold further into herself, heard her muffled cry as she tipped forward and he caught her in his arms. Twisting, he pulled her to him, throwing out any preconceived notions of disrespecting his commander by doing such a thing as holding her. Blast it! He saw her decimate entire seppie squadrons with a satisfied grin on her face, watched her distract his troops with childhood games and contests, heard her pester General Skywalker until her Master was ready to jettison her in an escape pod on whatever habitable planet happened to pop up the moment their ship left hyperspace. He had to follow orders as the Republic called for her capture, chase her down and lock her up, escort her to what could have been her execution. He feared for her safety every night since she left the Order.

Not because he thought Ahsoka couldn’t handle herself. No, it was everything else he assumed of life in the underground: nagging hunger, constant chill, the only consistency a new danger around every corner. Being able to feed yourself didn’t mean you were sated and full. Some days, it just meant you didn’t starve. No sun, no heat source besides ventilation shafts or whichever body you chose – if you were lucky to choose – and certainly little comfort to be found in that meager warmth. Through all that, his Ahsoka made it back to him and the General and the 501st. She made it back only to wreck on a graveyard of a moon.

“If I had done more,” she choked into his shoulder, hot tears soaking into the thin fabric of his collar, the warmth of her skin reminding Rex of the cold gathering around them. “If I had only done more… the war could have been over. We could have been free.”

Every unspoken fear, every wary hope, every piece of him that ever doubted he would know what to do with his life outside of the Grand Army of the Republic, whispered to him. Wearing Ahsoka’s voice, those dreams wrapped around him as his arms wrapped around his leader, promising and punishing him for each moment he thought about what came after the war.

“Anakin could have left the order,” Ahsoka continued, losing the battle against her control, beginning to sob. “When I left, I hoped he would leave, too. I was one less thing to leave behind.”

Rex held her tighter as she hiccuped, her words muffled against his neck, and he felt more than heard her say:

“I was going to go back. Rex.”

Reflexively, defensively, he held her tighter. After the way the Order disgraced her, shamed her, Ahsoka was going to go back? As much as Rex ached to see her return to the 501st, as much as the battalion missed her, as much as he knew the General missed her… she had done the right thing. The Jedi didn’t love her. Those arrogant Masters would have seen her dead before admitting they were wrong, would have sentenced her as a traitor to the Republic without taking a second guess at what they had done, and would have been too late to save her when the truth eventually unraveled. Anakin and Padme fought as hard as they could to clear her name and only in the last moments of that mockery of a trial had they rescued Ahsoka. Afterwards, when Anakin came back to the 501st without his snippy padawan by his side, Rex kept the men in line and enforced a false normalcy thereon out. The war stopped for no one, not even their lost Commander, and Rex became Anakin’s new confidant.

The General’s relationship with the Senator from Naboo was an open secret, his mentorship with General Kenobi in shreds, too many meetings with Tarkin behind closed doors for any good to come of that growing partnership. Rex felt the men growing uneasy at Anakin’s increasingly risky strategies and the Captain enforced the ranks where anyone dared shuffle out of step. If Ahsoka hadn’t trusted the Jedi enough to come back into their ranks, what trust was there for the clones in their Generals?

He was proud of her, always proud of her, for holding herself to a higher value than the Jedi Counsel had. He hoped she hadn’t regretted her decision. As much as he feared for her, Rex was glad. He wanted all the best of all the worlds to open up for her to find a new path. War was no way of life. And here she was, back with him, crying for the first time in the years he knew her. If Anakin was dead, Ahsoka would know it, and that was more than enough reason for tears. Had Cody murdered General Kenobi in the same way Rex shot at Ahsoka? Had any of the Jedi escaped? Rex knew there were padawans at the Temple on Coruscant. Would his brothers have killed younglings? The questions wrestled for attention, fought for words, and Rex bit them all back to focus on the form shaking against his armor.

"I was going to rejoin the Order. Be back with my Master, back to my old life. Back with you. Fix what went wrong.”

He reluctantly let her shift away to look up at him through the darkness and was never so thankful for the blindness the night brought. She wouldn’t be able to see the tears forming in the corners of his eyes, montrails no replacement for vision, and he still felt the burning shame from the last time she saw him cry. A broken man, a useless body, a brotherless soldier with no more war except the one inside him. Rex held perfectly still when he felt her fingertips tentatively touch his neck, wipe away the wetness of her tears and settle to rest against his pulse.

“There is no going back,” she said softly, her breath warmer than her fingers, every nerve in his body threatening to finally snap as he braced himself.

After Umbara, Rex fought unbidden thoughts about Cut and the Lawquane family on Saleucami. The words “only survivor” and “fled” rose to the surface of these distractions, taunting him, making the Captain question despite the things he told himself he knew. While there was a war to fight, he would never be alone. While under the direction of the Jedi, he would always have a family. He would never run, always stand his ground and fight, and anything less from him would be cowardly. He didn’t blame Cut anymore, hadn’t nearly since the moment he put the little farmhouse behind him on his way back to General Kenobi, but he never understood until Krell almost killed the entire 501st.

What was waiting for the clones after the war? What would be done with soldiers when there were no battles left to fight? What would happen to him? What choices would he make, if he were allowed to choose, and what would he want?

Cut had property, a house, land to farm. A horizon, rain, and a few inches of tillable dirt was all a man needed to make a living – the barn full of animals and produce that Rex had stayed in was a storehold of promise and security. Rex could make something like that for himself. Cut had a wife. A beautiful wife who worked alongside him, loved him, gave him comfort and children. Children. Rex didn’t have to wonder what his children would look like – he knew his own face on a child’s form from his life on Kamino – but wondered instead what would ever prompt him to consider fatherhood, to raise a lifeform he made from a loving union. Where would he find a plot of land to build on? Would anyone love a scarred war veteran? Did he know anything to teach a child besides war games and battle strategy? Did he want this strange and alien life for himself or was it a haunting delusion?

Dangerous questions for a clone never likely intended to survive the Republic’s war.

What Rex did know was he didn’t want to be alone. Never. Now, with a damaged Y-wing somewhere in the distance behind him and the smoldering ruins of the _Venator_ clouding any bit of starlight that would tell him where they were, the Captain was never so aware of his own mortality. Watching Dogma escorted away after the Battle of Umbara. Holding Fives in that moment of death. Rescuing Echo from torturous horror. The memories shuddered through him, rattling inside his chest to fight for the space his heart seemed reluctant to hold. Rex lived through all of it and there had been a point to that life despite the loss, despite the pain. There was a reason, a purpose, a greater goal unfolding far beyond himself. What now?

Ahsoka’s hand found his jaw, fingers stretching along the bone until her fingertips rested along his ear and tucked into the hollow of his temple, and Rex couldn’t bring himself to speak despite the unspoken invitation. Anything he said wouldn’t be enough to make up for shooting at her; fighting the chip in his head had taken every ounce of effort, the disgust with himself for pulling the triggers something that gnawed and spit deep within his gut. His head ached, the surgery site on his skull threatening to split him in two if he stopped long enough to think about it, and he knew he had stretched his body to a limit he hoped never to reach again. Her touch staved off the numbing fear that maybe he wouldn’t need to worry about what came next because his body wouldn’t last much longer under these conditions.

“We need to rest,” she conceded to his silence, her hand leaving his face to invite a chill that provoked the soldier to vaguely wonder what temperatures they would be dealing with as the night wore on. Without knowing when a sun would rise and the Y-wing in uncertain condition, they were stranded in the dark and at the mercy of whatever or whoever knew of the crash. How long until someone came looking for them? To which side would they belong?

Rex sighed again, heart jangling back into a steady enough beat to prompt his lungs to pull in an unsteady gasp as Ahsoka gently followed the line of his armor down to take his hand in her own. He was prompted to his feet, slipping in the sand as his Commander led him slowly back to their damaged spacecraft; she moved as though in water, sometimes tilting or hesitating, guiding them in the depths of blackness as only a Togrutan could.

“Wait here.”

She placed his hand on the side of their ship, leaving him as she searched among his stashed supplies, and he focused on the sound of her movements as the creeping fear of being left alone sought entry into his chest cavity. His heart thudded rapidly, now too fast instead of not nearly fast enough, and loudly enough that Ahsoka could likely feel it through her montrails as she continued to dig through sorted packs. The familiar rustle of bedrolls came to him through the growing panic and he began to recite a Mandalorian song to himself, silently, to continue chasing away the crushing promise of loneliness.

“We’re not protected much, out here in the open,” she whispered, her hushed words still shockingly loud in the otherwise absolute silence of their nocturnal landscape. “I don’t think anything is coming, though, for now.”

Guiding him once more, only a few steps from where he nearly quaked in exhaustion and fear against the cold stretch of metal, Ahsoka knelt down on bedrolls stacked deep enough to separate them from the uneven ground with some padding to spare. Rex unsteadily followed, armor clicking and pinching in the movement, and he felt Ahsoka’s hands join his own as he began to unstrap the plates and pads with weary hands. Dried blood flaked off under his nails as he put everything aside in what he guessed to be an uneven stack and, as he felt along the edges of the layered blankets, Rex found the barrel of a blaster near enough to be within a wide sweep of an arm’s reach.

“I’ll take first watch,” Ahsoka said finally, not an offer but a statement, as he heard her remove her own armored plates and bracers. A flat weariness in her voice cut through the familiar Jedi stoicism and simultaneous fear for both her and himself caused Rex to grasp out into the night. Clasping her arm, he couldn’t bring himself to use his voice to ask her to stay, wouldn’t put into words his selfish need to be by her side. He was made of sterner stuff than to plead in the unpartable dark but no amount of genetic inheritance could dismiss his desperation entirely. To protect and be protected. To defend and be defended. Unwaveringly, he needed to comfort and be comforted, a new shame flooding what little emptiness he had left to fill. If they fell asleep without setting a watch, Rex knew Ahsoka could escape whatever might dare approach. What happened to him wouldn’t matter as long as she got away. For as long as they could stay together, Rex needed her with him, even if Ahsoka didn’t need him.

Without response, with only a moment of consideration, Ahsoka settled down beside him and rolled gently into his arms. His muscles protested, his body tired of any movement whatsoever, but Rex thought nothing had ever felt so good as her warmth. She pulled a blanket up around their shoulders before wrapping her arm over his chest, fingers splayed along his collarbone, heel of her hand holding his heart in place. How did it take the fall of the Republic to bring them to a moment so natural that the realization bolted through him with a jolt?

“Ahsoka,” he breathed, a deep inhale bringing the first hint of clean air since they crashed on this desert moon. A thousand things he could have said, a hundred apologies to give, dozens of promises of make. Possibilities that had never been his before now suddenly bloomed in his throat and he repeated the devotion.

“Ahsoka.”

He curled into her, imagining starlight in her eyes, breathing in her faint scent. In his mind, he saw her happy and strong, as beautiful as she always was when she worked hard at something. When he dreamed of Cut’s farm, sometimes he saw Ahsoka on the horizon, a child’s hand in her own, and his son would pull away and run to him as he came out to greet his family. Those dreams had always startled him, distracted him more than the war nightmares, left him more exhausted than the nights he didn’t sleep at all. Here, holding her with the last bit of energy he pulled from the very marrow of his bones, those dreams shrouded him from the reality of what had just happened to them. To all of them. For a moment, he felt her relax into his embrace, relieved she hadn’t pulled away when he knew she sensed his thoughts.

“They’ll look for us,” Ahsoka replied quietly, sadly. “They’ll look for us and I can’t lose you again.”

“You’ve never lost me,” Rex assured, closing his eyes and finding comfort at last in the reality they now faced. The goal was the same now as it was before: survive.

They could do that. They’ve always done that.


End file.
